How to Use truShuffle, Spotisquare, and Viral Music List with Spotify

You can use several different tools with Spotify to help you generate playlists. truShuffle and Viral Music List help you pull together playlists and Spotisquare is a cool little tool that helps you find playlists based on your location.

truShuffle

Hugo Lindström has created truShuffle, a clever little tool from Sweden (where else?) that generates a Spotify playlist on the fly while you listen to music. To get it working, a Last.fm account is necessary, and you also need to register on the truShuffle website (it’s free).

Next, start listing to music on Spotify (making sure that scrobbling to Last.fm is enabled in your Spotify preferences). As if by magic, truShuffle recognizes the music you’re listening to, displays the artist biography and related info on its website, and then launches a related play-list in Spotify.

Hugo has also developed a snazzy, standalone desktop application for both PC and Mac, so you don’t need to have the truShuffle website open all the time for it to display information about who you’re listening to and what’s playing. When the application’s open, you don’t even need to have scrobbling enabled for truShuffle to add tracks to the playlist it generates for you!

Hugo says that during peak listening times, such as Friday nights, it may take a while for Spotify to sync the tracks.

Viral Music List

Viral Music List is a neat little idea that pulls together the most popular tracks, albums, and artists that people have shared on Facebook in the last 24 hours and presents them in a nice series of Spotify playlists.

Spotisquare

Foursquare is a fun social networking app that lets you plot your location by using a mobile phone, find out where your friends are, and view who else has checked in to the same place that you have. One bright developer thought up Spotisquare, which combines Foursquare’s location-based aspect with Spotify’s playlist functionality (and its mobile app).

When you check into a location by using Spotisquare, you can view any Spotify playlists that have been tied to that venue or use its connector tool to add your own.

A venue doesn’t have to be music related — you could be on a beach somewhere, listening to a related playlist that perfectly matches the lazy mood. If a venue doesn’t have a playlist tied to it, you can add your own for other people to enjoy. A clever idea, but it needs bigger word of mouth to really get going.